new forum feature: Liking a post

With last night's upgrade of the forum software, it's now possible to indicate that you like a particular post, or found it particularly helpful. To that end, there's a new button on the right of each post, next to the "quote" button: . Clicking that will make the "Like" count of that post go up by one, indicated by the thumbs-up button:

Note that you need to be logged in to use the button, and that you can "Like" any post only a single time. If you clicked the button by mistake, or changed your mind about it later, then you can "unlike" the post by clicking the button again, which at that time would look like this: .

It's not possible to "unlike" a post to begin with - this feature is supposed to indicate helpful posts, not start some kind of voting mechanism. So it's more like the "Like / Unlike" feature on FaceBook than the "Vote up / Vote down" that sites like DZone have. But it's entirely implemented here on the Ranch - nobody else (FaceBook or any other site) gets to see which posts you liked.

It's also not possible to "Like" your own posts - you'll have to leave that to others :-)

How about having the count displayed on the post even when the user is not logged on? As the purpose of this like/dislike button is to promote relevant answers, shouldnt everyone be able to see it when they read a topic?

Sridhar Santhanakrishnan wrote:How about having the count displayed on the post even when the user is not logged on? As the purpose of this like/dislike button is to promote relevant answers, shouldnt everyone be able to see it when they read a topic?

I like that idea. That was more an oversight than a conscious decision.

James Elsey wrote:What about having a count on peoples profiles to see how many posts they have made that have been liked?

I don't think we'd want to turn this into a beauty contest. This feature is about helpful posts, not helpful people (who tend to get noticed anyway). It would also be rather easy to manipulate.

Would it also make sense for the forum search to return posts with a higher "like" number nearer to the top of the list of posts returned?

Ulf Dittmer
Rancher

Joined: Mar 22, 2005
Posts: 42958

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posted Oct 06, 2010 12:10:26

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Paul Clapham wrote:Would it also make sense for the forum search to return posts with a higher "like" number nearer to the top of the list of posts returned?

That's an interesting thought. It would tie in nicely with the "sort by relevance" feature of the search page (except that the "like" info is part of the DB, not part of the Lucene index - but that could be remedied).